Apple EOLs 9 Boxed Software Titles for Retail

Apple Inc. sent a letter to its U.S. channel and retail network Wednesday with a notification that nine different software titles would no longer be available as boxed software at retail stores. Apple said that the software will only be available as boxed titles through Apple’s own online store, while some are also available on the Mac App Store as downloads. Two have been marked End Of Life (EOL) in all channels.

I guess this is the beginning of a new era (well it has been coming for while)

I can see the point of this.

With software which ~you have~ to download and install via an integrated system, it will reduce piracy to some extent. Also with these small apps, many are very cheap almost nominal prices so people are more willing to pay for an app which they might previously have ‘borrowed from a friend’ - I have in the past had pirated versions of apps which were too expensive for me - oddly I rarely used them and eventually deleted them.
With cheaper apps, I think people will be more willing also to upgrade to newer versions even if the writers are only adding a handful of improvements - the costs to users will feel less because they will be smaller but more frequent, and similarly for the creators, their incomes will probably be less ‘bursty’

Looking at the online Apple Store, I note further that only the Snow Leopard upgrade disks ($29 single, $49 family pack) are still there; these license you to upgrade a Leopard (10.5) installation to Snow Leopard (10.6). If you still had 10.4 on your Mac, Apple used to offer a Mac Box Set ($129 single, $199 family pack) that, in addition to providing copies of iLife and iWork, allowed you to install 10.6 without previously having 10.5 installed. However, as of Wednesday, the Mac Box Set has disappeared. This means that, for the first time in Apple history as far as I am aware, there is no supported means of upgrading certain otherwise-supported Macs (early Core 2 Duo machines that shipped with 10.4 and were not previously upgraded) to the newest version of the operating system.

This might seem like a niche within a niche, but it’s important to those of us who resell our Macs when we upgrade. I hope to do so with my early Core 2 Duo iMac soon; I need to keep my 10.5 and 10.6 install disks and their associated licenses for other older Macs, so unless I’m willing to violate said licenses, I’ll have to sell it with 10.4 installed. I would like to be able to tell the buyer that he or she could upgrade to the most recent version of Mac OS X (without buying intermediate versions separately), but at present I can’t do so.

Bryan - can you ask some questions about the USB drive version that will be sold next month and see if it can be used to install 10.7 on a supported Mac model without having 10.6 previously installed there?